INTERVIEW WITH DR. GREG EMERY
Aleena, Anagha, Zibiah, Milind, Lindsay, Sabari and Team
ALEENA: According to you, how does philosophy
contribute to humanity in today’s world?
GREG: So, there are at least two questions
there. On the one hand, you are asking what’s the value of philosophy. So, this
is one of the oldest questions of humanity, and if you go back to the ancient
Greeks, they’ll tell you that philosophy is the goal itself.
The best philosophy isn’t used for something
else, it's not practical. The value is in the philosophy itself.
Moving on to the next question - how does it
contribute to humanity and society - so one of the most basic philosophical
questions is those concerning the nature of the self, like what does it mean to
be authentic? How do I live a good life? And, who am I and what’s my
relationship with people and so on.
Sometimes, the answers aren't as important as
the questions because asking those questions makes a person more mindful of
those issues and that raises the quality of a human being. So, on the one hand,
it’s wrongheaded, says some philosophers, to value philosophy for what it can
do. So, philosophical thinking has its own value in itself.
The other answer is that the value of
philosophy is probably in being mindful in the asking of the most essential
questions of what it means to be. How about that? (Laughs)
ANAGHA:
Yes, asking the right questions.
ALEENA:
How do you think one can lead an authentic
life in this digital era?
GREG: So, two questions. There is this old
joke, it’s said in different ways that, whenever you have two philosophers
together, you have 10 different perspectives. So, were you at the presentation
yesterday?
ANAGHA:
No, sir.
GREG: So, I talked a little bit about being
authentic in this digital age. On the one hand, the answer is that I can never
inform another person on how to be authentic.
That’s for each of us to determine…you know,
I myself have a hard enough time on deciding what an authentic life is for me
and following through with it. I’m not even sure what it means for me to be
authentic. So I can’t tell you what it means to be authentic.
But the other question is, in the digital
age. I mentioned yesterday that I don’t know if it’s more difficult to be
authentic today than it was 50 years ago or 500 years ago or 5000 years ago.
You know, not all humans in my experience are inclined to worry about that
question; not all people are inclined to be philosophers or philosophical-minded.
It’s a few people, a minority. But I think, in the digital age, there are a lot
of changes.
In my lifetime, in ways that I can never
imagine if I was in your age, digital technology in the form of things like
social media and digital marketing and that had become much more all-consuming
than I would have ever expected. I’m able to resist it, I think, because of my
age a little bit more, but then I have two daughters who are about your age. I
think they struggle with how much their identity is inside of social media,
their persona, how they present themselves as who they are, which is probably
quite different from how they actually are.
They are creating their persona based on how
they like to be seen, not on who they are. If they are sitting here, I’m gonna
say the same thing because they would say the same thing. When I talked to a
lot of students your age, all of them are, probably you can say, addicted to
social media.
Not all, a lot, or they spend more time
online, in YouTube and Instagram. But I think they don’t always like that. It’s
like they spend more time doing that when they don’t want to, but they do it
anyway. So there are different challenges of being authentic in the digital age
than there were in my generation.
So, I think that each of you, individually,
your generation, have to work out on that. I think, going back to read ancient
wisdom in the history of philosophy, there is some wisdom in the history of
philosophy. So, we’re almost back to the first question, that being well-read
in the history of philosophy and understanding how people have approached these
deep questions and how deep thinkers have thought about these issues, maybe you
can pick an idea here and there that helps you resolve these questions. So, you
know, these traditions in India, in China, and the West are thousands of years
old, and you have to figure that some good ideas are in there somewhere. But it
is a tough job to find those. So good luck, you know.
So, I think, in the digital age, there are
different challenges to pursuing existential authenticity. I think that, on the
one hand, it’s always a challenge, and on the other hand, I think, the digital
age is much more incomplacent than
anything I’ve seen in my life. I’m sixty-six, and I’ve spent almost exactly half
of my life before digital and exactly half of my life in the digital world. So,
in my experience, now that I’m older and thinking about all of these, it was
better before the digital age. I lived the same life, I travelled
international. I did my degrees, I wrote my publications, I met and interacted
with people, I went to parties, I did everything that you do on social media or
other kinds of digital engagements, and I didn’t need it. So my life hasn’t
been improved by digital stuff, my life has been complicated by digital stuff.
But there is no way to avoid it now. Even today, with misunderstandings about
who’s gonna be here and when, so that happened before digital time too. But,
you know, you sent me an email, but you didn’t get copied, and someone else
also sent an email. So, that’s not a complaint, it’s a normal thing. It’s a
problem in communication. Did you all study any communication theory?
EVERYONE:
No.
GREG: So, in communication theory, there is
an idea, and now I have to encode it. For example, my idea is “meet at six
o’clock” but then I accidently say “meet at five o'clock”. I made a mistake as
I encoded. Then I sent you an email, but you didn’t check it as you were busy,
and then you hear from him that I said four o’ clock, and that’s called noise
in communication. Then it gets decoded, and you show up to meet me at three
o'clock over there when it should be six o'clock over there, right? It’s like
the telephone game where kids play in a whisper. I whisper, whisper, whisper,
and by the time it comes here, it's a completely different message. So, the
point is that, for the telephone game, the digital world hasn’t improved much,
in my opinion. You don’t know a world that’s not digital, you don’t know it.
You can’t imagine, one time, you won’t believe this, I was in Thailand and I
was in a small town. My friend was coming from the US to meet me before email.
He said, How are we gonna meet? I said,
I don’t know. I was in Thailand and he flew from the US to that village. We
didn’t have a time, a place, anything, and we met. So, the question is back to
what it means to be authentic and the requirement. I think, being mindful, how
you create your persona, who you really are, how the media can start to cause
you to distort yourself. I guess it’s back to that, like being mindful of what
you're doing and then being in a pursuit of authenticities on your own. That’s
up to you.
ALEENA:
Sir, what are the career options that
are available to students after pursuing philosophy for their higher studies?
GREG: That’s
an interesting question. You’re gonna hear all the time that philosophy is a
useless degree, has no practical application,
that's what they told me. On the one hand that's true. So then we get back to
philosophy for its own sake. Maybe it's the wrong way to look at it, you don't
do philosophy for something else but that doesn't help because you need a job,
right? Yeah. Unless you want to be a philosophy professor, that kind of
thinking is not very helpful. So the good news is that, for all of the liberal
arts degrees like English, History, Social Science, philosophy students do much
better doing non-philosophy stuff than other discipline stuff, demonstrated by
higher income and I think the reason for that is the ability for critical
thinking. More practically, now that we are in the age of generative AI, who
knows what this could mean. I don’t know.
You've probably heard of the phrase “prompt engineering”, do you know
that?
EVERYONE:
No
GREG:
Did you use Gemini? I think ChatGPT is better.
EVERYONE:
Yes.
Greg:
Okay so prompt engineering is the skill of asking the right questions. You can
study prompt engineering, you can get a degree in it, but it's not really
engineering. I don't like this phrase "prompt engineering sounds like
engineering", there is something to that but it's not the technical stuff,
it's understanding how generative AI thinks, which you can do. Understanding
how to ask the correct questions to get the answers you are looking for and
that's what critical thinking is. So in some ways “prompt engineering” is
unnecessary jargon for asking questions correctly and there's a whole career
field in this. It’s not being an undergraduate, writing a paper on it, and
becoming a professor. In every field, including medicine and business, there are
specific AI apps. Now I can see philosophy majors being the best at working in
like prompt engineering fields. So it would be a good idea to explore prompt
engineering while majoring in philosophy. And this is what's always been the
case, at least in the US, many see studying philosophy as a stepping stone to
other career fields which include law, clergy etc., but it's also good for
writing skills because Chat GPT writes better than I do, but I'm a good writer.
This is something that always amazes me. So that gives me a dilemma, why should
I give you second best writing when I can give you better writings from Chat
GPT. But businesses don't worry about these ethical issues, business wants
results, law wants results. Do you want the second best brain surgeon, or do
you want the one who uses ChatGPT or AI to do the brain surgery the best? Okay,
it's easy to answer, right? So I think there's career options outside of the
normal ones of law, clergy and maybe some writing things. So this is very
early, uh, to think about this, but it might be something you might want to
explore for example. So yeah, and there's a lot of certificates, of course,
everything's free online you can even study anything you want about you,
anything or some other people. So in the sense that you probably really want a
job. Then, the other thing, though, is again looking, you know, undergraduate
philosophy might be a stepping stone. But you know, I would never say, try to
be a professor because the jobs are not existing as for a thousand PhDs in
philosophy. There might be only one job. So somebody gets the job but 999
people don't so whether you want to gamble, that is up to you. But I don't know
the education system in India as well as I do in the US. In the US, it's quite
easy to study an undergraduate degree in this and then get the master's degree
in that. So I don't know how that works here.
So you know, for let's say, it's very practical
degrees like philosophy is good for MBA or really looking for anything because
again, for you, the thing I heard most because you know I stepped outside of
philosophy and did business stuff and the thing I always heard so many times is
that I approach things differently, and sometimes that's better, not always.
Sometimes I don't fit in, but sometimes to have the outside perspective is
what's valuable. So I think you just have to, like, the trick is to figure out
what skills you've gotten from studying philosophy, maybe not so much you know,
Plato or epistemology or something. Quite honestly, I think Chat GPT helps with
that. Try to think of what skills you've learned from studying philosophy and
then build on that in terms of career.
ANAGHA: So ,it's
like it helps you to build skills which you can use for many other fields.
GREG:
Yeah, transferable skills. So I think that the trick though, is to articulate,
be very clear, maybe on your resume or something to be able to articulate what
those skills are- communications skills, critical thinking skills, writing
skills, and on and on.
ANAGHA:
I think that is one of the reasons why many professionals from other fields as
well, come to study philosophy. We also have a lot of students here who were
formerly in a different field, but then they felt the need to learn philosophy.
So they came.
GREG:
But are they coming to use it because they're interested in asking those
questions?
ANAGHA:
Yes. They understood that whichever field they are in, they need to have that
ability to ask the right questions.
GREG:
So this is interesting. And this is like something that it's an issue that you
can't solve, but maybe it's an issue you can be aware of. You know the myth, or
probably the reality, is that Indians are quite good in tech stuff, quite good
in computer stuff and quite good in math stuff. I think it's true, yes?
EVERYONE:
Yes.
GREG:
So with generative AI coming, a lot of those tasks are going to be taken over.
So what I see is businesses, they're not just with Indians, Chinese, Americans,
Germans, everybody, because, for so long, about 20 years, all universities have
been pushing towards STEM (Science Technology Engineering Maths). Because that
was the way to get a job. But what you hear is businesses want people that are
creative, people who can speak clearly, people who can reason, people who can
write well, which is philosophy right? But then, again, I'm saying this is a problem you can't solve. So
businesses say we need people like that. Philosophy
is making people like that. But businesses never think of hiring people from
philosophy, despite needing exactly those types of people. And I didn't
even meet people, business people say, “I can hire, you know, if I can find
somebody that has thinking, writing, speaking skills, I can train them with
technology”, but still they don't think about hiring philosophers. So this is a
big issue that I can't solve, none of us can solve. I think the trick is, you
know, is the other advice. This isn't
why… okay I'll give you some advice. So you might see jobs advertised that
you're interested in and they want a degree in business or chemistry or
something and you think “why, I don't meet the requirements”. Apply it anyway and list the skills you have, let them say no.
You don’t say, I'm not qualified. Let them tell you that you're not qualified.
What can they do, delete or throw out as trash? Okay. No penalty to you except
a few minutes of your time. A lot of times too when you see the jobs listed,
that maybe you're not qualified for? You'll see kind of the skills they're looking
for and probably you have those skills as philosophy majors, so let them say
that.
ALEENA: Sir, what made you choose “Heidegger’s
Typewriter” as the topic for tomorrow’s seminar?
GREG: Because it is so fun. It's
a very goofy topic. It's just a fun topic. But it has some deep implications,
for some other things we're talking about today, it has to do with
authenticity, it has to do with the technology which also includes typewriters.
Have you ever used a typewriter? Anybody?
EVERYONE: No
GREG: Oh! It’s so much fun. The
sound, the smell, but even for Heidegger, that's too much. So it's a fun topic.
But it also has some implications for authenticity, for how we relate to
technology, which you just have to take one more step to go from typewriter to word
processing, and then one step more from where it has it into social media. So, it
looks like a cool technology. Typewriters are cool. I did my PhD over 500
papers on a typewriter and may not make a mistake. So if I type all the lines
and I make a mistake at the last part, I start again. Very painful. Well, also
a disappointment, right?
EVERYONE: Yeah!
GREG: So mindfulness. But I
prefer my Word Processor. (Everyone laughs).
ALEENA: Is there anything particular that drew your attention towards
Heidegger’s works?
GREG: So
that's an interesting question. So… you know, because I studied and have two
master degrees of philosophy. And so you know, I read a whole history of
philosophy like West, East, American, European uh… so I have several reasons I
think why I gravitated towards Heidegger. I had a professor who I loved a lot.
But he just did phenomenology. And he didn't even like Heidegger that much. He
liked Husserl. Have you ever studied Husserl?
ALEENA:
Edmund Husserl?
GREG: Yeah.
Did you study about him?
ALEENA: I
had read somewhere about him.
GREG: He is
quite different from Heidegger. But Heidegger was his student. So the professor
we studied phenomenology and then a part of that class for one week or
something was Heidegger. And for me, that was the one, that kind of like, lit
up. The one that I found the most interesting and most, we can say, called to
me. So I found it very engaging, and it even prompted me to learn German. So I
actually did my dissertation work in German and went to Germany and studied to
write my dissertation on Heidegger, in Germany. I had a scholarship. And you
can't really do German philosophy unless you have some understanding of the
German language. I think that is the case for anything. You can't do Shankara
without some understanding of Sanskrit and so on and so on. So I got very
interested in the German language mixed with Heidegger. It's almost the same
thing. Hard to separate. But again you know, his ideas...so this is very
strange, you know, many people say Heidegger is very difficult or... he's very
funny though. I don't know if you've read much Heidegger. Many people say it's
a bunch of bullshit, it's a bunch of nonsense. "What is this? It's
junk." Other people have different opinions, I have a different opinion. I
don't think so. I found him deep and profound and I like the questions he asks.
You know, philosophy again, I think the questions are often the important
thing. So, why did I go to Heidegger? I don't know that I know exactly the
“why”, but, he was most attractive. But I also love Plato and the whole German
tradition. It’s like, it kind of came out of Heidegger's thoughts. It's called
Theory of Interpretation, Hermeneutics... But there is another interesting
thing and maybe this is a factor and maybe it's not. I'm German blood. So my
name is not German. Emery, that's an Irish name. But when my grandfather's
father died, he was adopted by an Irish guy. So my blood name is Altendorf,
which is very German, I guess. So my blood, you wanna say that, is hundred
percent German. So maybe my brain is hardwired that way. Even my grandparents
in the US didn't speak English until they went to school. So I think my mind is
even before philosophy and yes, just because of grandparents and parents, we
must have some lucky German mind somehow a little bit. Something like that,
maybe, yeah.
ANAGHA and
ALEENA: Thank you.
GREG: Are
you going to publish this?
ANAGHA: Oh, maybe. I do a blog,
so I'll transcribe this.
GREG: Can you send it to me somehow?
ANAGHA: Yes.
SABARI: Sir, can I ask you
something?
GREG: Yes Please.
SABARI: The
thing is that as you mentioned philosophy in other fields, why can't there be a
paper or something like that, which includes this kind of course. What is your
suggestion about this? As you said, the solution for this thing should come from
our mind. So I thought, maybe, we do a lot of courses. I'm doing a Bachelor of
Business Administration. So we do have business ethics and all the other
things. Why can't we have business philosophy, or some kind of course, then
some of which can focus only?
GREG: I am
not even a part of the university, and I think you have to ask your professor
about that. (Everyone laughs )
SABARI:
Yeah, we care about your suggestion. So what's your suggestion?
GREG: So I'm going to try to come
back here but uh, so I think business, I think it's okay. But sometimes, very
technical and I think it's not so deep. It's so interesting, but not always. But
you should study.
SABARI: Thank You Sir.
ZIBIAH: Sir I also have a
question.
GREG: Yes Please.
ZIBIAH: So at the beginning you
said something like finding our information to, you know, kind of navigate our
existence in this digital era?
GREG: Or accept that your
existence is meaningless (Everyone laughs). If you want to validate it, go
ahead. Of course.
ZIBIAH: You
said about finding your own information for your own life, authenticating your
life, right? What are the few things that you found out for yourself?
Maybe one or two things.
Greg: So it
hasn't, uh, it wasn't really an easy journey. A lot of my life, if I made a
mistake, I thought I was being authentic and I'm just being selfish. And that's
a subtle distinction. And I don't know that even now, I can make the distinction correctly. But now, since I'm or, uh, you
have your life in front of him, most of my life is behind me and when I look, I
know that my choices were made because I'm trying to be authentic. And now I
wonder, was it just being selfish? It's kind of horror, it's like a horror
story. If I want to play the role of a ghost, well (everyone laughs) uh, but,
but, uh, yes, you know, so I would just say if the pursuit of authenticity is
important to you, just be mindful and the thing is you know that's saying that
you can see the pass very quickly. Because at the moment I was making the right
decisions of course. I wasn't saying okay, authentic decision, selfish
decision, I'm going to pick a selfish one now. Of course nobody does that. And
I look back, oh! And don't be afraid to contradict yourself. There is a famous
American poet, Walt Whitman, and one of his things is, “you say I contradict
myself, so I contradict myself”. So I think, don't worry about having
everything organized. All the pieces don't fit.
ZIBIAH:
Maybe yeah.
GREG: Of
course I guarantee. (laughs). I'll be dead, but when you're 66, you will think
about this conversation.
ZIBIAH: I
guess most of us are at this point right now.
Sometimes yeah this don't fit and let it be like that.
GREG: There
is some wisdom to learn to let it be and even late Heidegger, he talks about
letting it be. He uses the German word galosl
height?(36:51), which means let it be. So he kind of changed from, so there
are like three stages of Heidegger and the early Heidegger is considered of
course an analysis of being which includes authenticity and all of the stuff
that does around that. But then for some reasons, he change to, still concerned with being, the question of
being, meaning of being. But he actually, it's called the term and he had a big
change in his philosophy. So in later philosophy, he kind of, he doesn't abandon,
but he moves away from that questions of authenticity and stuff. It reached to
this attitude of ‘let it be’ and in German, it is called____(37:49), which is a literal
translation. But it has more like existential
influences?(37:51). It doesn't mean just accept everything, right? It's not
just okay, but it's like, maybe like the word of 2024 ____ (38:09). In America,
everything cured, it's so tired of that work or carry. But so, it's like
mindful living. Engaged living. He even talks about like what active non do (38:28) okay? And the Chinese
philosophy, we have been called Wu-wer. Have you ever studied Chinese
philosophy?
EVERYONE:
No.
GREG: So in Chinese philosophy,
it's called Wu-wer. So it is a kind of similar concept. Did you study Taoism at
all?
EVERYONE: Yeah.
GREG: So you need to study. Because Heidegger
studied Taoism. It's kind of a mindful living. So maybe it's accepting those
contradictions that are your life. You're not going to make all the pieces, that’s
guaranteed. Sorry about that. (Everyone laughs).
ANAGHA: That's how it is.
(Everyone laughs).
ALEENA: Thank you so much sir for
interacting with us.
EVERYONE: Thank you sir.
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